In 1976, the year Jimmy Carter was elected President, I was in fifth grade. I recall my elementary school holding a mock election, something I don’t believe schools do anymore due to the extreme political divide which has been stoked since then. Particularly in the past decade.
As you might imagine, I enthusiastically voted for Carter, somehow intuiting that he was the candidate who would represent me better than Gerald Ford.
I was right – and I’ve voted for the Democratic candidate in each subsequent election since.
Jimmy Carter’s plain way of speaking and wholesome background appealed to me. His family included a daughter, Amy, who was nearly my age and somehow I felt connected to her with her strawberry blonde hair and freckled face. They just seemed nice.
Of course, I knew very little of politics. My mother refused to watch any news broadcasts because it was always “bad news,” so my impressions of President Carter were, at the time, fairly superficial. What did strike me, though, was his commitment to new, clean energy sources. I wasn’t sure how solar energy worked, but it somehow made more sense to me than waiting in long lines on alternate days for gasoline which seemed to be rapidly running out.
When Ronald Reagan beat Carter in 1980, I may have been temporarily taken in by the new President’s Hollywood glamour. I was 13. What can I say? Getting those hostages released (and flown into nearby Stewart Airport) was a pretty good flex, wasn’t it?
Of course, as we later learned, that entire situation was manipulated by Reagan’s incoming administration to prove Reagan’s strength – and Carter’s weakness.
It was as fake as the benefits to the lower economic class of trickle down economics.
Now, here we are, preparing to bury Jimmy Carter as we brace ourselves for a second term of braggadocios bullshit from the 21st century’s version of Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump.* As my sleep is once again interrupted with thoughts of dread and fear of what’s to come, I’m finding some comfort in the fact that Jimmy Carter won’t be around to see it.
He was too good for us.
*Read this article for more Reagan/Trump comparisons.
DelSo 
BINGO !